The Summer I Turned Pretty

I’m going to give y’all the real ‘skinny’ - I’ve lost a lot of weight the past 10 months. Like a whole ‘7-year-old old’ worth of weight as one friend put it.

And I did it through hard work and dedication.

Meaning I worked very hard to be able to afford medications, and I have been dedicated about injecting them into myself every week. :)

I’m very open about the fact that I have used Semaglutide or ‘Kroger brand Ozempic’ as I like to call it, to aid in my weight loss. While I do aspire to be hot, I also don’t want to feed into the horrible monster that is comparison, or act like this insane transformation was purely due to having discipline. Also, no one would ever believe that I suddenly gained an unprecedented amount of self-control.

I was STRUGGLING with my weight significantly in 2024. I’d always been a bigger girlie. For as long as I can remember I’ve thought about my size. Even as a young child I remember wondering why I wasn’t cute and small like the other girls in my class. As I got older I questioned how my weekly yoga, climbing, hiking and Pelotoning didn’t seem to make me any fitter. I didn’t eat terribly but it felt like if I didn’t dedicate my entire life to fitness and food I’d never stop gaining weight.

I’d tried:

• The intense calorie tracking

• Rigorous daily exercise routines

• Secretly tried pills that made you poop out fat (even despite reading the reviews of people pooping their pants in public, waking up to orange oil stained bed sheets - that made for a few terrifying months of dating).

• I even got Phenteramine prescribed by my doctor which was a great affordable first step in terms of losing weight, but it also ramped up my already simmering anxiety and my Tourette’s Syndrome. I became borderline agoraphobic and ticing at levels I hadn’t experienced since its peak at 10.

Nothing sustainable worked and I started to give up.

Then I discovered GLP-1 medications I could order off the internet. As I near the end of a year on this meds I found myself wondering what exactly they’ve been doing - and can I hack this in my gut without continuing expensive shots?

Anyways, this Substack is about the microbiome, not my personal weight loss experience (although wow! Has that been a fascinating trip of psychology, exposing both my own personal and societal biases - perhaps as a part of this series I will divulge all the knowledge I gained in my own ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’).

So in this series, I am going to be covering all the sciencey things about GLP-1 and the microbiome:

1. What even is GLP-1?

2. What are GLP-1 meds doing to your body to make you lose weight (and the off-putting side effects some experience)?

3. Can you naturally hack GLP-1?

4. What else do we know about the microbiome and weight?

Stay tuned for this series going beyond the Ozempic craze and diving into this fascinating molecule in every single one of us.